Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton

      3

       Ecstasy

      BY THE TIME he began filming Ecstasy, Gustav Machaty enjoyed a reputation as a director of art films. His most celebrated work was an erotic masterpiece, Seduction (Erotikon), made in 1929. The film concerned the sexual encounter between the daughter of a station master and a stranger and opens with scenes from their night of love, which marked the film as highly explicit without being pornographic. Immersed in Czech modernism, the Jewish Machaty had reputedly worked in Hollywood as an apprentice to D. W. Griffith and Eric von Stroheim, though this may be a self-penned myth. He was definitely back in Czechoslovakia by 1926, when he made The Kreutzer Sonata and Seduction. He followed this in 1931 with his first sound film, From Saturday to Sunday (Ze Soboty Na Nedeli), which was also the first Czech sound film. Scored by the Czech avant-garde jazz composer Jaroslav Jerek, the film still feels like a silent era production. Structured again around a young woman's awakening desire, the story follows a prim secretary who is offered money for sex while out with her friend at an up-market nightclub. Outraged, she slaps her escort and flounces out into the rain. In a sequence that anticipates Ecstasy, she is soaked in a downpour and accepts a passing stranger's offer to come and dry off in his apartment. There follows an intensely erotic sequence, after which a series of misunderstandings leads the couple to part and finally be reunited.¹

      Machaty met Hedy in Berlin in 1931. He liked casting unknown or nonprofessional actors and struck by Hedy's looks, he chose her for the part of the young woman Eva in Ecstasy. Shooting on Ecstasy began in July 1932, although the film had been in preparation long before that. While she was waiting for Machaty to begin, Hedy returned to the Viennese stage. In February 1932 she replaced Marta Lille in the role of Sybil (originally played by Karin Evans) in the Komödie Theatre in Noel Coward's Private Lives for the last few weeks of its run. Sybil is one of the four main characters in Coward's comedy of manners; it was another good part for the young actress. Hedy Kiesler's star was quickly rising.

      To shoot Ecstasy, the cast and crew traveled to Czechoslovakia. The bathing scenes were shot near Jevany, close to Prague. Otherwise, the outdoor scenes were shot in the Carpathians, in and around Dobšiná (site of the famed Dobšinská Ice Cave). They lived in this “godforsaken place,” according to Hedy, “like the most simple of people from the Steppes. And because the sun only shines brightly there for a few hours, and in the morning and afternoon a thick mist falls over everything, we had to be careful to use every minute we could. At lunchtime, we huddled in the small camera van to grab a quick bite of food.”² The café sequence was shot on the elegant Barrandov Terraces on the outskirts of Prague, a location that would have been easily recognizable to locals, as it was a popular day trip from the city. The film was shot in three language versions—German, Czech, and French. For the French version, Aribert Mog was replaced by Pierre Nay and Leopold Kramer by Andre Nox. The Czech actor Zwonimir Rogoz played the father in all three versions. Hedy, too, played Eva in all three versions; “she learnt Czech in a few weeks,” Aribert Mog told a reporter.³ In fact, as Joseph Garncarz has demonstrated, Hedy was post-synched by a Czech speaker having first of all delivered her lines in Czech to camera.⁴ Not only could she play her role in multiple languages, she also endeared herself to her director by translating for him on set.

      Ecstasy continued the celebration of awakening female sexuality that had made Seduction such a conversation piece. The story focused on a young woman, Eva (Hedy Kiesler), who marries a much older man, Emil (Zvonimir Rogoz). He turns out to be impotent and she leaves him. During a nude swim in a lake, her horse bolts, taking her clothes with it. She is rescued by a young engineer, Adam (played by Aribert Mog), working with a gang of laborers. They fall in love. Her humiliated husband shoots himself and she leaves Adam. The film ends at this point in certain versions; in others, an added scene sees Eva nursing a child, while in another shot Adam is at work, apparently dreaming of his lost love.

      The camera delights in caressing Hedy's face and framing her body in one erotic pose after another. In the film's early sequences, as long as she is trapped in her marriage to Emil, she is presented as a precious object, part of the opulent furnishings of that wealthy man's life. Only when she frees herself of the city's glamour, by literally tearing off her clothes and throwing herself in the water, is Eva able to return to the Garden of Eden and find her Adam. Machaty did not require that Hedy act, she simply had to let herself be filmed. He saw to it that through framing and diffuse lighting, this slightly plump teenager was transformed into an object of post-pubescent desire. Gone was the small-town daughter of the house that her audiences knew from her Weimar films; this Hedy Kiesler was defined by her languid movements and natural sexuality.

      Shot just three years after D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Loverhad been the subject of an obscenity trial, Machaty revisits much of the territory that made Lawrence's novel so controversial. Here, again, is the story of a young well-bred woman caught in an impotent marriage and finding sexual release in the freedom of the outdoors with a younger, more earthy lover. In his essay on the film, written shortly after its release in Europe, Henry Miller teased out the connections between the two. Each time he saw Ecstasy, and that was four or five times, he noticed that the audience responded in the same way: “cheers and applause mingled with groans and catcalls.” The hostility, he was convinced, “has nothing to do with the alleged immorality of the film. The audience is not shocked but indignant.” This indignation he ascribed to the film's pacing, which delivered none of the conventional pleasures of narrative drive but rather forced the spectator “whether he will or no, to swim in the very essence of Machaty's creation…Beneath the public's hostility is the grudging admission of the presence of a superior force, a disturbing force.” Since Miller locates this force in the solar plexus, we needn't doubt his point; what is disturbing about this film is its sexual energy, an energy that moves beyond the boundaries of the screen and, in Miller's description, into the auditorium. Machaty's Adam and Eva are creations of the instinct rather than the intellect: “Their meeting is that of pure bodies, their union is poetic, sensual, mystical. They do not question themselves—they obey their instincts…In Extase the drama is one of life and death, life impersonated by the two lovers, death by the husband. The latter represents society as it is, while the lovers represent the life force blindly struggling to assert itself.” So in the final sequences of the French version, as the lover is left sleeping on the bench and the train pulls out of the station bearing away his mistress, the audience was most disturbed—”Is there perhaps the flicker of a suspicion in their addled pates that life is passing them by? I notice that the resentment is largely confined to the male members of the audience. Could one read into that a Freudian story of bankruptcy?”⁵

      Miller was dismissive of the undertones of Soviet filmmaking that he picked up in Ecstasy, but they influence its aesthetic as much as Lawrence. The engineer, by virtue of his profession alone, is highly reminiscent of the idealized virile hero so beloved by Soviet filmmakers. Similarly, the repeated shots of the husband's monocle and his